The Heartbreaking True Story of Chris Watts and His Wife and Daughters' Murders

• On August 13, 2018, Colorado father Chris Watts murdered his pregnant wife, Shanann Watts, and their two daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste.
• Chris pleaded guilty to the crimes that November and is currently serving a total of five life sentences in prison.
• Now, Lifetime is airing a new movie about the case on Saturday.

The murders of pregnant mother of two Shanann Watts and her daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste, sent shockwaves cross the country in 2018. The crimes were heartbreaking and senseless — and their horror was only compounded by the fact that Shanann's husband and the girls' father, Chris Watts, had confessed to committing them.

Now, Lifetime has created a feature film and a new documentary about the case, which are set to air back-to-back on the network this Saturday starting at 8 p.m.

Ahead of the premiere of Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer and Beyond the Headlines: The Watts Family Tragedy, here's what you need to know.

Chris's wife and daughters disappear

Around 2 a.m. on August 13, 2018, Shanann Watts's friend Nickole Atkinson dropped her off at her Frederick, Colorado, home following a business trip they had taken together. But when Nickole tried to get in touch with Shanann just a few hours later, she couldn't get ahold of her — and after Shanann missed an ob-gyn appointment, she grew worried. Nickole decided to call Shanann's husband, Chris, at work. She also called the police.

The police conducted an investigation of the Watts home that afternoon, and even though they found no signs of foul play, they did find Shanann's car and all of her personal belongings. So the next day, Shanann and the girls were officially declared missing, and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) released Endangered Missing Person alerts for them.

The investigation

In the days that followed, Chris's story changed drastically. He initially told police that he had no idea where Shanann, Bella, and Celeste might be, and he began giving media appearances appealing to the community for help in finding his missing family.

Meanwhile, investigators from the local police department, the CBI, and the FBI had been going through Chris's phone records, which showed that he had been having an affair with one of his coworkers from Anadarko Petroleum. Then, on August 15 (two days after his wife and daughters' disappearances) Chris failed a polygraph test — and that's when everything changed.

That afternoon, Chris vowed to tell police the truth if he could talk to his father first. Investigators took a gamble and allowed him to do so, and it worked: Chris confessed to his father that he had killed his wife. Not long after, investigators found Shanann, Bella, and Celeste's bodies exactly where Chris said they were: at an Anadarko Petroleum site, with Shanann's body in a shallow grave and the two girls' bodies in oil tanks.

And so, on August 21, 2018, Chris was charged with his family's murders.

What really happened?

In his initial confession, Chris said that he had strangled Shanann in a "fit of rage" after watching her smother their two daughters, Bella and Celeste. She was upset, he said, because he had tried to talk to her about separating and ending their marriage, and she had retaliated by killing the girls. After murdering Shanann, he took the three bodies to the oil site and buried them, he said.

Come November, however, Chris's story had changed again. This time, he confessed to killing his wife and daughters and pleaded guilty to all nine counts against him: five counts of first-degree murder (including two additional counts for his daughters because they were children under 12), one count of unlawful termination of a pregnancy, and three counts of tampering with a deceased human body. Ultimately, he was sentenced to five life sentences (three consecutive and two concurrent) for the murders, plus a total of 84 more years for the other crimes.

Although Chris had pleaded guilty to all three murders, he hadn't yet told the real story of what happened on the morning of August 13, 2018. But in a five-hour follow-up interview with investigators from prison, Chris revealed the truth: After fighting with Shanann that morning about his wish to separate, Chris strangled her to death. While he was trying to bring his wife's body downstairs, he said, Bella and Celeste woke up and came to ask him what was going on. He then loaded the girls and their mother's body into his truck, drove to the oil site, and smothered the girls one by one before disposing of the three bodies.

Where Chris Watts is today

Today, Chris is continuing to serve out his life sentences at a maximum security prison in Wisconsin, where he was transferred because of "security concerns" in December 2018.

Shanann and the girls are survived by her parents and brother. But Shanann's loved ones are not in support of the new Lifetime movie, as their lawyer informed Inside Edition.

"It's a false narrative that does not accurately depict who Shanann was in life, who Bella was in life, who CeCe was in life," attorney Steven Lambert told the publication earlier this month. "When people go out and make things without their input ... it does pain them, it does hurt them."

The Lifetime movie does reportedly give some credence to the theory that the weight-loss medications (pills and patches from Thrive, a brand that Shanann did sales work for) that Chris was taking allegedly affected his ability to sleep and think clearly. Chris has talked about this in interviews with investigators, but the medication is not widely believed to have played any role in his crimes.

You can watch the feature film Chris Watts: Confessions of a Killer on Lifetime on Saturday at 8/7c. The film will be followed by Lifetime documentary Beyond the Headlines: The Watts Family Tragedy at 10/9c.